Suzanne Lebsock (born December 1, 1949 at Williston, ND [1] ) is an American author and historian. Her works include her first book The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 which was published in 1984 and won the Bancroft Prize, [2] and A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial . She has won the Francis Parkman Prize for her writing, and as of 2010 [update] is a Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She specializes in women's history.
Lebsock has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and MacArthur foundations. [3]
Lebsock was formerly married to Richard Levis McCormick, a former president of Rutgers University. They have two children, Betsy and Michael.
The Pulitzer Prize for History, administered by Columbia University, is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Letters, Drama, and Music. It has been presented since 1917 for a distinguished book about the history of the United States. Thus it is one of the original Pulitzers, for the program was inaugurated in 1917 with seven prizes, four of which were awarded that year. The Pulitzer Prize program has also recognized some historical work with its Biography prize, from 1917, and its General Non-Fiction prize, from 1962.
Petersburg is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 33,458. The Bureau of Economic Analysis combines Petersburg with Dinwiddie County for statistical purposes. The city is 21 miles (34 km) south of the commonwealth (state) capital city of Richmond.
In the British colonies in North America and in the United States before the abolition of slavery in 1865, free Negro or free Black described the legal status of African Americans who were not enslaved. The term was applied both to formerly enslaved people (freedmen) and to those who had been born free.
Joan Little is an African-American woman who was charged with the 1974 murder of Clarence Alligood, a white prison guard at Beaufort County Jail in Washington, North Carolina, who attempted to rape Little before she could escape. Her case became a cause célèbre of the civil rights, feminist, and anti-death penalty movements. Little was the first woman in United States history to be acquitted using the defense that she used deadly force to resist sexual assault. Her case also has become classic in legal circles as a pioneering instance of the application of scientific jury selection.
Jayne Anne Phillips is an American novelist and short story writer who was born in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia.
Partus sequitur ventrem was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there; the doctrine mandated that all children would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of enslaved women would be born into slavery. The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property (chattels).
The Francis Parkman Prize, named after Francis Parkman, is awarded by the Society of American Historians for the best book in American history each year. Its purpose is to promote literary distinction in historical writing. The Society of American Historians is an affiliate of the American Historical Association.
A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial is a book by Suzanne Lebsock detailing the cases surrounding the murder of Lucy Pollard in 1895 in Lunenburg County, Virginia.
Annette Gordon-Reed is an American historian and law professor. She is currently the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University and a professor of history in the university's Faculty of Arts & Sciences. She is formerly the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard University and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Gordon-Reed is noted for changing scholarship on Thomas Jefferson regarding his relationship with Sally Hemings and her children.
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is an American historian and Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her scholarship and teaching forwarded the emergence of U.S. women's history in the 1960s and 1970s, helped to inspire new research on Southern labor history and the long civil rights movement, and encouraged the use of oral history sources in historical research. She is the author of Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching;Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World and Sisters and Rebels: The Struggle for the Soul of America.
Freedom suits were lawsuits in the Thirteen Colonies and the United States filed by slaves against slaveholders to assert claims to freedom, often based on descent from a free maternal ancestor, or time held as a resident in a free state or territory.
Adele Goodman Clark was an American artist and suffragist.
Hudgins v. Wright (1806) was a freedom suit decided in the favor of the slave Jackey Wright by the Virginia Supreme Court. She had sued for freedom for herself and her two children based on her claim of descent from Indian women. Indian slavery had been prohibited in Virginia since 1705. Since 1662, slave law had incorporated the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, saying that children born in the colony took the social status of their mothers.
Anne Firor Scott was an American historian, specializing in the history of women and of the South.
Brenda Elaine Stevenson is an American historian specializing in the history of the Southern United States and African American history, particularly slavery, gender, race and race riots. She is Professor and Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in History and Professor in African-American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). From Autumn 2021, she will be Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women's History at St John's College, University of Oxford.
Jane Minor, also known as Gensey Snow, was an African-American healer and slave emancipator, one of the few documented enslaved healing practitioners in United States history.
Rosa L. Dixon Bowser was an American educator. She was the first black teacher hired in Richmond, Virginia. She organized the Virginia Teachers' Reading Circle, which became the Virginia State Teachers Association, the first organization representing black teachers in Virginia, serving as the organization's president from 1890 to 1892. Bowser was president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in Virginia, as well as founder and first president of the Richmond Woman's League. She was a correspondent for the magazine The Woman's Era, and wrote essays for national publications.
Ruth Sara Feldstein is an American historian with research interests in United States history; her work focuses on 20th-century culture and politics; women's and gender history; and African American history. Currently she is professor of history and American studies at Rutgers University.
Ariela Julie Gross is an American historian. She is the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law (USC).
Jessie Fremont Easton Townsend was an American suffragist. She was active in the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia and was an early member of the Norfolk branch of the organization.